Friday, July 1, 2011

Page One: Inside the New York Times

No one would disagree that the American printing press is in
a big crisis like never before. Newspapers go out of
business like a wildfire burning out of control. But that
doesn't mean there are less "news" feeds nowadays. To the
contrary, the sources of news media are more crowded than
ever. I bet you should have no trouble to answer the
question about where you normally get your news from when
your juggle your electronic gadgets. However, how credible
is the content you are reading? More importantly, how often
do you ask that question in the rapidly moving information age?

I, not alone by any count, am very skeptical about what I
read online or even in print about news, unless I can
trace a report back to institutions that I have not lost my
faith yet, such as The New York
Times. However, will The New York Times
survive from tough challenges in the news business?
Director Andrew
Rossi's engrossing documentary "Page One: Inside
the New York Times" (USA 2010 | 88 min.) takes
an intimate look at news reporting inside one of the oldest
empires in the press.

In a fly-on-the-wall
style, the filmmakers observe how news stories get
discovered, followed, and eventually printed by the
diligent work from the reporters at The Times. Over a
period of more than a year, the filmmakers follow four
journalists at the Media Desk including a charismatic
hoarse-voiced straight talker
David
Carr, an energetic fast paced Brian
Stelter, a media reporter who later becomes Baghdad
Bureau Chief Tim Arango, and their no-nonsense editor
Bruce Headlam.

It is absolutely fascinating to learn how these
journalists strive for excellence in news reporting by
observing their daily operations, during a trying time for
printing press and at a time of war
when WikiLeaks takes the
headlines.

Although the title gives the impression that the film is
about how a story appears on the front page of The
New York Times, it's not. David
Carr steals the movie with his candid and opinion-ed
remarks about journalism, and many other things. He
becomes the most interesting and fascinating character
in the film that actually holds the film together.

On the front page of The New York Times, it
claims: "All the News That's Fit to Print."
Obviously, that requires the paper's existence for the
news to be printed. Yet, the existence of the paper is
nothing short of struggle. Where will we get factual original
reporting if the Times flips its belly, which might
really happen?

If nothing else, this film is thought
provoking about news reporting and news consumption
when more and more news aggregators flood the internet,
while less and less fact-checking in-depth investigation.

The New York Times' new editor Jill
Abramson says: "In my house growing up, The Times
substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the
absolute truth."